What’s your favourite animated movie or TV show?

Maybe you’ve just seen The LEGO Movie, or perhaps you recall the Fantastic Planet. Some will remember the great stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen (were there really only seven skeletons in that precedent-setting and nightmare-inducing fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts?) or the films of Canada’s own pioneering animator, Norman McLaren.

Maybe your favourite animated film hasn’t been made yet – well, now’s your chance!

The National Film Board of Canada’s new animation application for the iPad has been redesigned, enhanced and renamed; it’s now available as StopMo Studio.

That’s stop mo, as in stop motion (or stop frame) animation, a normally tedious and painstaking procedure that’s now a lot easier to do.

Originally released as a program called Pix Stop in December 2011, the NFB’s StopMo Studio gives both newbie and pro creators alike a powerful yet easy to use program to make animated videos using frame-by-frame stop-motion.

Perhaps more importantly, the enhanced new app presents several options for presenting your creations across popular video sharing and social media networks like Vimeo, YouTube, Facebook (e-mail, too).

Stop frame animation is a technique to add movement, life and action to otherwise static, inanimate objects.

Basically, you point your iPad – front or back facing cameras – at the object or its setting. You take one shot; that’s the first frame of your movie.

Then, you physically move the object slightly, or changing its setting minutely, and then take another picture.

Repeat. Repeat again.

Traditionally, this repetition takes place 24 times for each and every second of your film! Classically trained animators know this can be a lengthy– sometimes painful – process, but the results can be amazingly realistic when the movie is run at full speed.

(Feature films run at 24 frames per second; video is often measured at 30 frames per second, but basic animation can be achieved with just five or ten frames.)

The new app makes the process much easier to manage, no matter how many shots you take; for example, new auto settings will capture images at a pre-determined rate per second (and there’s an auto time lapse setting for shooting over much longer periods).

Picking up on a classical technique used by experienced animators, the StopMo app lets you match scenes and compare tiny movements with the ‘Onion Skin’ feature – a process used in professional animation studios to overlay one image over another to ensure the movement is as fluid as possible.

There’s also a Grid feature to superimpose lines on the scene to help match scenes and objects.

Another StopMo Studio innovation is the ability to import outside images into the app. Other improvements have been made in digital drawing, title cards and sound FX tools.

So StopMo is out now with 20 new functionalities in all, and there are already some very engaging examples posted online of the content that can be created using the app.

It app was developed and designed by Mivil Deschenes and Jean-Sebastien Beaulieu for the NFB, working with acclaimed animation filmmaker Patrick Bouchard, who provided his expert input and advice on all the creative tools it contains.

Bouchard used StopMo Studio to create a new short animated film that’s on the NFB’s Vimeo and YouTube channels, along with a how-to video about all the app’s features.

Bouchard’s creations are just the latest in a decades-long output from the NFB, known as a pioneer in producing inventive stop-motion films, live action docs, mobile apps and other interactive content.

NFB animation founder and cinema pioneer Norman McLaren was a master of the stop-motion pixilation technique, creating such classic works as the Oscar-winning Neighbours (1952) and A Chairy Tale (1957), co-directed and starring Claude Jutra.

More recent examples of great NFB stop-motion creativity include Jutra Award winner The Brainwashers (2002) from Bouchard, and the Genie Award-winning and Oscar-nominated Madame Tutli-Putli (2007), by Maciek Szczerbowski and Chris Lavis.

So there’s plenty of inspiration available for the next generation of animators, and there’s plenty of access to the tools available.

StopMo Studio is available for the iPad 2, optimized for iOS7. For a limited time, the app’s available special launch price of just $0.99.

Hey, the price alone should make a budding animator’s nightmares end!

 

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submitted by Lee Rickwood